The Reverend Clementa Pinckney, pastor of the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, was murdered last week at a Bible study session in his own house of worship. What he died for is almost impossible to capture or clarify right now. But one cause he definitely died for in witheringly painful irony, was the reconciliation of the Civil War in the city where it began. He died in the state where the Confederate battle flag still waves on the Capitol grounds, where neo-Confederate memory and politics endure with a tenacity like nowhere else, and where Pinckney was one of only two votes in the state senate opposing the latest South Carolina voter ID law designed to limit the franchise for black and brown people. He died in a politics that kills.

Just two months ago, on April 19, 2015, Pinckney and I shared the speaking duties, along with Chaplain Joel Harris of the Citadel, at an extraordinary commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War in Hampton Park, Charleston. Some four years earlier I had joined Charleston’s remarkable mayor, Joseph Riley, and others in unveiling a special large plaque at the same site, commemorating the “First Memorial Day.”

In the final months of the Civil War, approximately 268 Union soldiers died in an open-air prison in the infield of the lowcountry slaveholders’ horse-racing track, known then as the Washington Jockey Club. Charleston was not evacuated and occupied by federal forces until late February, 1865. In March and April of that spring, with most of Charleston in complete ruin from wartime bombardment, African Americans began to try to salvage their liberated lives, in part, by asserting their ownership of, and new meanings for, public spaces. At the race track, they found the mass graves of the Union dead who had been hastily buried behind the grandstand. Black workers reinterred all the bodies in individual mounds; around the graves they constructed a wooden fence, with an entrance covered with an arch. They white-washed the fence, and on the arch they wrote: “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Then on May 1, 1865, black Carolinians, almost all former slaves, joined by several units of Union soldiers, white and black, along with northern missionaries and abolitionist school teachers, held a solemn march, bearing armloads of flowers and singing “John Brown’s Body,” around the oval track of the race course. After their deliberate parade, as many as could fit gathered in the graveyard; five local black preachers read from scripture and a black childrens’ choir sang spirituals, the “Star Spangled Banner,” and “America the Beautiful.” Then they broke up into picnics, listened to speeches, and children chased each other and their dreams while the troops held maneuvers. African Americans, along with their Union army and abolitionist allies, had created the great American tradition of Decoration Day. And for them, they had declared the reality and meaning of their own emancipation; it was their new Independence Day of a Second American Revolution.

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Later in the nineteenth century, after the Confederate Lost Cause tradition had solidified control over the public memory of the Civil War in Charleston, the old race course became Hampton Park, named for Wade Hampton, the former Confederate general and post-Reconstruction white-supremacist governor of South Carolina. The Union dead were eventually all removed and reinterred in the national cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina, their original gravesite obliterated along with the archway announcing their martyrdom. Hampton Park was re-landscaped and hosted fairs and exhibitions; today it sits prominently and beautifully adjacent to the Citadel, the state’s military academy founded out of the Confederate war effort and its memory.

On April 19, I was the first speaker after the Citadel Chamber Choir sang the Navy hymn, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.” The skies were gray and windy; thunderstorms threatened but did not visit our ceremony held before the mixed crowd, black and white. We had gathered near the site where the old grandstand stood a century and a half ago. I recounted how the first Decoration Day came to happen at that place, trying to get the audience to grasp some of the profound meanings that those who held it may have wanted to convey. I especially stressed that they were commemorating their own version of earthly and spiritual victory—the freedom of the slaves, the liberation of South Carolina from the Confederacy, and the triumph of the United States, the federal government, over the attempt to destroy it. My job was merely to be a historian telling the story.

But Pinckney was the heart and soul of the event; it was for him to declare the higher meanings and longer purposes of our assembly. He took the lectern and delivered an 11-minute homily based on Second Samuel: 18-19. As soon as he began, one could feel past and present meet. A sense of history seemed to penetrate with every burst of the wind in our faces and the sound of his deep voice.

David W. Blight (far right) with Clementa Pickney and the Citadel Chamber Choir to his left (Courtesy of Ethan J. Kytle)

As he had no doubt done many times before, Pinckney offered a brief history of Emanuel church, of how it had been burned down in the wake of Denmark Vesey’s aborted slave rebellion planned at the site in 1822. He managed to garner polite laughter from the audience about the audacity of Vesey’s claim that blacks had a place in America’s democratic promises. Pinckney exuded kindness and humor even when he was revisiting a very painful history. He invoked the memory of Daniel Alexander Payne, the Charleston-born African Methodist Episcopal Bishop who helped revive Mother Emanuel during the Civil War in 1862. Then, the pastor named his text and read from part of Second Samuel.

Here was the agonizing Old Testament story of civil war and family strife with utterly tragic consequences. King David has just won a major victory over his enemies, his city and his people are saved. But he learns that his beloved son, Absalom, had fought against his armies. “And the victory that day turned into mourning unto all the people: for the people heard say that day how the king was grieved for his son.” David’s general, Joab, delivers the news as the king sits in the “chamber over the gate.” “But the king covered his face, and the king cried with a loud voice, ‘O my son Absalom, O Absalom, my son, my son!” Absalom had died in battle, fighting against his father.

Pinckney reminded us that we were commemorating a national event of equal gravity and tragedy. Our Civil War, said the minister, had been brother against brother, “father against son, generation against generation.” Then he found a refrain: “We stand in the gate, the archway, and remember a war that divided houses.” King David had both won and lost in his divided house and he wailed of his pain. Reverend Pinckney pushed on with the image of “divided houses,” but to remind us that from such depths of agony can come a dawn of knowledge, understanding, and even-tempered healing. Pinckney was suddenly the voice of reconciliation for the vast chasms left by the Civil War, not merely the sins of Christians. He admitted that there had been some blacks loyal to the Confederacy in their own homegrown ways. Especially in a place of tortured memory like South Carolina, he argued, we should acknowledge “all the blood” lost on both sides.

Pinckney was suddenly the voice of reconciliation for the vast chasms left by the Civil War, not merely the sins of Christians.

So inclusive—so reconciliationist—was Reverend Pinckney’s message that momentarily it troubled me. But he drew deep from the Bible and reminded us that “God is no respecter of persons or causes.” A native of South Carolina, a pastor and politician, Pinckney had long ago learned how to navigate Civil War memory in his state. He rounded out his homily with the image of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, extending “honor” to all the dead. Pinckney ended by saying that Hampton Park may not have experienced a “Gettysburg,” but it was equally “hallowed ground” because of the sacred ceremony of 1865 that we had assembled to remember.

Civil wars force impossible choices, leave devastation beyond human control, and make people murder their own kin, their best friends, and even their loving hosts at Bible study. Consumed by hatred and jealous rivalry, Absalom murdered his brother Amnon, and then went to war to seize his father’s throne.

Our ceremony ended poignantly as Chaplain Harris told of his Irish immigrant great-great-grandfather who fought in the Union army and lived to marry a woman whose father fought in the Confederate army. A young female Citadel cadet bugler stood off to the side of the platform and played “Taps.” Then we all rose and sang “America the Beautiful.” Pinckney and I held the program together and sang into the wind.

No one could know that two months later he would be dead, murdered by the handgun of a young assassin who would slaughter the forgiver, the voice of reconciliation, an assassin consumed not only by hatred and neo-Confederate white supremacy, but by a broader politics that suppresses the right to vote, foments racism on talk radio, the internet and television, a politics that kills. South Carolina—America—is breeding its own Absaloms; they will kill their fathers, their brothers, their kings, and lest we find a new politics, they will continue to make us wail.

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”

On Tuesday, the district attorney in Durham, North Carolina, dismissed all remaining charges in the August case. What does that mean for the future of statues around the country?

DURHAM, N.C.—“Let me be clear, no one is getting away with what happened.”

That was Durham County Sheriff Mike Andrews’s warning on August 15, 2017. The day before, a protest had formed on the lawn outside the county offices in an old courthouse. In more or less broad daylight, some demonstrators had leaned a ladder against the plinth, reading, “In memory of the boys who wore the gray,” and looped a strap around it. Then the crowd pulled down the statue, and it crumpled cheaply on the grass. It was a brazen act, witnessed by dozens of people, some of them filming on cell phones.

Andrews was wrong. On Tuesday, a day after a judge dismissed charges against two defendants and acquitted a third, Durham County District Attorney Roger Echols announced the state was in effect surrendering, dismissing charges against six other defendants.

The preacher, dead at 99, advised presidents, mentored clergy, and influenced millions of people. Will his legacy of non-partisan outreach continue?

Billy Graham, the famous preacher who reached millions of people around the world through his Christian ministry, died on Wednesday at 99. Over the course of more than six decades, he reshaped the landscape of evangelism, sharing the gospel from North Carolina to North Korea and developing innovative ways to communicate the message of the Bible. He influenced generations of pastors and developed friendships with presidents, prime ministers, and royalty around the world. His death marks the end of an era for evangelicalism, and poses a fundamental question: Will his legacy of bipartisan, ecumenical outreach be carried forward?

Graham came up as a preacher during the post-war era, a time when American Christianity was being radically remade. “When Billy came on the scene, fundamentalism, as it’s called, was really prevalent,” said Greg Laurie, the pastor of the California megachurch Harvest Christian Fellowship and member of the board of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, in an interview. “Billy wanted to broaden the base and reach more people.”

A new study finds that many household goods degrade air quality more than once thought.

On the final day of April 2010, unbeknownst to most locals, a small fleet of specialists and equipment from the U.S. government descended on the seas and skies around Los Angeles.

A “Hurricane Hunter” Lockheed P-3 flew in from Denver. The U.S. Navy vessel Atlantis loitered off the coast of Santa Monica. Orbiting satellites took special measurements. And dozens of scientists set up temporary labs across the basin, in empty Pasadena parking lots and at the peak of Mount Wilson.

This was all part of a massive U.S. government study with an ambitious goal: Measure every type of gas or chemical that wafted by in the California air.

Jessica Gilman, a research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was one member of the invading horde. For six weeks, she monitored one piece of equipment—a kind of “souped-up, ruggedized” instrument—as it sat outside in Pasadena, churning through day and night, measuring the amount of chemicals in the air. It was designed to detect one type of air pollutant in particular: volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. VOCs are best known for their presence in car exhaust, but they are also found in gases released by common household products, like cleaners, house paints, and nail polish.

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.